Filhos de Odin - Space Apps Challenge

Filhos de Odin| Quiet Planet

Quiet Planet

The COVID-19 outbreak and the resulting social distancing recommendations and related restrictions have led to numerous short-term changes in economic and social activity around the world, all of which may have impacts on our environment. Your challenge is to use space-based data to document the local to global environmental changes caused by COVID-19 and the associated societal responses.

Midgard Project

Summary

The project consists of a role-playing game where the main villain is the Coronavirus. In the game, there are plenty of “new worlds” that represent places in the real one. The player, as the hero of the game, must pass through the levels to defeat the villain and its henchman. The time played will be converted to planted trees to assist nature that were deforest. The player can help with donations, seeing ads and making in-game purchases. All the money raised will go to NGOs that focus on helping the environment.

How We Addressed This Challenge

Our project belongs to challenge number 1 because, with the available data, we can demonstrate the environmental changes in the period before and after Covid-19 in a fun way, like a game. We will show the good and the bad consequences that the virus has brought to nature. For example, the level of particles in the air has plummeted in northern India, as deforestation in the Amazon has increased over the same period.

How We Developed This Project

The Corona Virus has become the biggest problem of the century. It restricted the economic activity of many countries and forced humanity to stay at home, isolated in our ‘worlds’ from the real world. This has inspired our team, because there is a positive and negative point in this situation. Because of the stalled economy, the air quality improved, but on the other hand, some people took advantage of the situation and started to deforest. So we want to show and entertain people in this difficult situation, at the same time that we recover the area of lost nature, through an RPG game.

Fights with friends and moderated outbreaks were responsible for the game development. We use the available data to build our 'worlds' based on the real one, collecting images (landscapes, cities) from satétiles and turning them into pixel arts. We didn’t code it yet, but we believe that it will work in C, Python or Java.The problems encountered were: how can we publicize the application and how to update them when new information arrives, since we will use the representation of the real world. The achievements were the gain with experience in general, the teamwork and the discoveries of new tools, increasing the learning.